My place of work purchased a used HP Designjet 815mfc printer and scanner. This MFC uses a touchscreen computer to control the printer and scanner. However there was a problem. The computer was unable to open pdfs. This is pretty stupid considering that’s what we need to print.

First thing I noticed is that this computer is running a special GUI over windows xp embedded. I know this because there’s a sticker on the back that says Window XP embedded. With this information at hand, I decided to copy the os over to a vm. This would allow me to transfer the virtual hard drive from the printer VM to another VM running windows. This allowed me to pick though the os’ files. Nothing really popped out at me, so I decided to edit the registry in an effort to get me full desktop. The best I could do is to enable task manager, But this was enough.

When I booted the vm printer and started the task manager, I looked to see what was running. From this, I was able to find out the software that was running in place of the desktop. This software is called JETimage. I found there website, and then found an faq. In the faq, they explained that, in order to use pdfs, gnu ghostscript had to be installed. So two days later, I had my answer. Yay! Now let’s find out how to do all of that.

Taking Back Control Via the Task Manager!

First thing we need to do is to edit the registry. The way that I did that is via BartPE. You could also edit the registry by mounting the drive to another windows computer.

When I boot to BartPE, I hit the start button and open cmd. Then I type
regedit.exe and hit enter. That launches regedit.

Then I highlightHKEY_USERS

hit
file ,
load hive

navigate to
data(C:)/Documents andSettings/scanneruser

open
NTUSER.DAT

name it something, doesn’t matter what, just remember it.

Navigate to that hive

go to
Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies

highlight
system

and then change
DisableTaskMgrto 0

boot back into the main os.

You should now be able to hit
ctrl-alt-del to start the task manager. We now have control.

Now we must install ghostscript

Now go here and download the GNU license and download the version for windows 32 bit. throw that download onto a thumb drive and plug the thumb drive into the printer’s computer.